KCMOSD'S NEW SUPERINTENDENT

KC’s new superintendent is a whirlwind who gets results
Posted: 05/07/2009 12:27 AM
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PUEBLO, Colo. One meeting done. Another one waiting.
John Covington pauses for a moment to answer a question about his past.
Does he know how people remember him from his days as a prison guard in southern Alabama?
Covington, the man chosen to be Kansas City’s next school superintendent, smiles at first, listening.
His uniform was always immaculate, the story went. All creased. All spick-and-span. It was more than just the pride he took in himself, they said. It was as if he wanted to show himself as a role model to those men behind bars.
But now a storm rises in the 50-year-old superintendent’s eyes.
He had to pull prisoners’ records as part of that job, he says. He saw scores on aptitude tests that showed many of the men had academic ability.
“Those kids were in school someplace,” he says, leaning forward. “The system failed them miserably.
“That’s heinous.”
• • •
Know this about John Covington, said Kathy West, his associate superintendent in Pueblo City Schools:
“He’s impatient. … He’s going to turn your community upside down.”
He came to Pueblo a rising star. He had lifted Alabama’s tiny Lowndes County school district above its impoverished resources and expectations in his first superintendent job.
He rolled into Pueblo, a steelworking town along the southern Rocky Mountains, three years ago with a mantra that Pueblo schools would compete against the world. He would leverage federal dollars. Intensify training. The community would drive a vast strategic plan, and everyone would be held accountable.
Keep in mind, says Andrew Lang, a community leader recruited to help guide the planning, that “people in Pueblo are pretty fixed.”
The population isn’t transient, he said. Outsiders stand out.
Many teachers feared he might be a union breaker, said Carole Partin, president of the Pueblo Education Association. He was coming from Alabama, a right-to-work state that doesn’t allow compulsory union membership.
A seven-year steelworker strike that ended five years ago still pervades the city’s psyche, said West, who has been with Pueblo schools more than 37 years. “Some of that anger is still out there,” she said.
Covington’s accomplishments couldn’t have happened, she said, if he hadn’t brought the community in, if he hadn’t worked with the teachers.
Even his detractors seem to agree that Pueblo schools are surging forward and that the plan is a success.
His negotiations with the teachers union have been contentious, Partin said, but agreements have been reached and she sees no threat to the union.
Is he after the union?
“No,” Covington said. “I’m not a union breaker. I don’t have time for foolishness.”
• • •
Hazel Covington, at 82, has been through four hip surgeries. But she still gets around on her own in the house she built near where her father labored as an Alabama sharecropper.
“I know if I can make one step,” she said, “the Lord will make two.”
Her children are her greatest success, she says, and that includes “Johnny,” the third of four whom she raised alone after a divorce when Johnny was in the third grade.
“I didn’t have a penny saved to help him,” she said. “He went off to college with one good pair of blue jeans and one with the knees out. I know he was determined. He’s been determined all his little life.”
His fraternity brothers at Alabama State University in the late 1970s sensed an unusual drive in Covington, said Donald Dotson, who would join up with Covington several years later working for Montgomery, Ala., schools.
They knew Covington had come from Enterprise, Ala., a rural and mostly poor community. But his manner, especially the way he talked, fit somewhere beyond small towns or even college frat houses.
“He wouldn’t use slang,” Dotson said. “That stood out. It was like he wanted to make sure his diction was perfect … like he was preparing himself.”
“Sometimes,” said his mentor, C.C. Baker, “I thought he was a little too serious.”
Baker, 79, Covington’s uncle and the former assistant state school superintendent of Alabama, watched his nephew come out of college.
He saw the way Covington carried himself when he worked at the Draper Correctional Facility.
“I knew he wouldn’t be staying a prison guard,” Baker said. “Johnny was watching. Johnny was asking questions.”
Soon he was following Baker’s footsteps, earning a master’s, earning a Ph.D.
Hazel Covington knows her son kept a hard pace. His girlfriend — his future wife, Wilanie — would knock on his door and push him on to class when he worked odd night hours, his mother recalled.
He never had much. His mother said that if she had $15 left at the end of the month from her job as head cook at a hospital, “I’d send him half of it.”
Teaching jobs led to principal jobs. And then came the day in the mid-1990s that Dotson saw his college brother again, now as an assistant superintendent for Montgomery Public Schools.
“In the back of my mind,” Dotson said, “I thought: ‘It’s come to fruition.’ ”
• • •
Lowndes County Schools, with a mere 2,000 students, was the kind of district that might take a chance on a rookie superintendent.
In Covington, Lowndes school board president Steve Foster said, the board saw “a large talent” they believed could manage classrooms, schools and finances.
“It was evident he had a vision where we could be and a plan how we could reach that level,” he said.
Covington took over a district where some schools still used coal-fired furnaces and some lacked air-conditioning. In his third year, he sparked a campaign to put a property tax referendum before voters and it passed, Foster said. “And that’s a rare thing in Alabama.”
Schools were modernized, said Daniel Boyd, the assistant superintendent who would take over after Covington. He put high-tech distance learning centers in the high schools. He involved the community in a plan that would foretell the work he would do in Pueblo.
“We knew,” Foster said, “that his ultimate goal would be in a larger district serving more people.”
After six years in Lowndes County, the timing seemed right in 2006 to take on the Pueblo job. John and Wilanie Covington’s two sons, whom they had adopted after serving as their foster parents, were grown and well into successful careers. Their daughter had started college.
Wilanie Covington, who is an assistant school principal, wanted to continue her career in Montgomery, near Lowndes County, so the couple for the first time managed a long-distance relationship.
Wilanie came with John when he interviewed for the Kansas City job and met the community last week. But they still have to decide, John said, whether Wilanie will move too.
• • •
Progress, say some of Covington’s current and former staff members, has come at some cost.
They hint — or say outright — that it is hard working for him.
One said Covington demanded that his top staff keep their cell phones on day and night. If he called, they’d work, even if they were sitting down to Christmas dinner.
And many teachers have been uncomfortable with the way he has pushed some ideas, including increased classroom observation and the possibility of using student performance scores in teacher evaluations.
“It’s like a whirlwind at times,” said Robert Vise, Pueblo’s director of assessment and technology. He showed a chart with 22 initiatives across six departments, all launched during Covington’s tenure. But the district also has increased training for staff and teachers, Vise said. He believes the plan is working.
Covington is the “cheerleader behind (Pueblo’s plan),” Vise said. “When he gets excited, he sounds like a Southern Baptist preacher.”
He’s not kidding.
Here’s how Covington showed off the alcove where six file cabinets house all the records tracking the six pillars of the plan.
Here’s the flow chart. “The community is at the top,” he says. Here are the six principles: individual education plans for each student, international standards, highly qualified teachers, strong character building, modernized schools, sound financial planning.
“You better not be caught doing anything not designed to meet the goals of this plan,” he says. “This is the Gospel. This is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in this district.”
• • •
If Kansas City lets it happen, said Baker the mentor, Covington is going to get results that have been a long time coming.
Pueblo’s elementary schools were already performing well when Covington arrived, and reading scores released last week show they’ve gotten stronger. Middle and high school scores won’t come out until summer, but most everyone seems to believe the plan is leading Pueblo where it wants to go.
Kansas City presents a greater challenge. Baker knows it. Like everyone entwined in Covington’s career, he’s read about the community’s struggle to free itself of a gloomy history of board and superintendent conflicts. “He’s going to demand much of himself and everyone under his watch,” Baker said. “He’s going to step on some toes. And anytime he steps on a toe, that toe can’t kick him out.”
This is the kind of job Covington imagined when he was accepted in 2008 into the Broad Foundation’s Superintendents Academy to train for the nation’s most challenged urban school districts.
He believes, he said, in the Broad mission that has no patience when children are not learning.
He couldn’t stand it with those young Alabama prisoners years ago.
You can be sure, Baker said, he won’t stand for it in Kansas City.



THIS IS WONDERFUL AND I HOPE HE CAN TURN THE DISTRICT AROUND. IN ANOTHER ARTICLE I READ HE IS PLANNING TO "GET RID OF" TEACHERS WHO AREN'T MEANT TO BE IN THE CLASSROOM. I AGREE THIS IS A GOOD IDEA. I WAS BORN TO TEACH AND IT IS A SKILL THAT CAN BE LEARNED BUT THE BEST TEACHERS ARE BORN WITH THE HEART OF A TEACHER. AND EVEN THESE PEOPLE CANNOT SUCCEED WITHOUT THE ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT AND SUPPLIES THEY NEED. JOHN, I HOPE YOU PLAN TO HOLD EVERY SINGLE PRINCIPAL JUST AS ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR PERFORMANCE AS YOU DO THE TEACHERS. OTHERWISE YOUR PLAN WILL NOT BE SUCCESSFUL. AND OH YEAH, I KNOW YOU HAVE A LIMITED BUDGET TO WORK WITH BUT YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO CONSIDER FIGURING OUT A WAY TO INCREASE THE STARTING TEACHER SALARY SINCE IT IS CURRENTLY AT 32,900 WHICH IS THE LOWEST IN THE METROPOLITAN AREA. I SUGGEST ASKING THE POLICE CHIEF TO SELL ALL THE PATROL CARS HE JUST SPENT OUR TAX MONEY ON SO THEY COULD SIT AT KCI FOR A YEAR WHILE WE ALSO FOOT THE BILL FOR THE STORAGE FEE.